I've been nerding out on battery life tests between a ThinkPad Yoga L13 (10th gen Intel Comet Lake) and the new M1-based MacBook Air 8/512 with 8-core iGPU. I used a mixed typical-office workday with about 3 of the last 5 hours on zoom. Yes, I signed into Zoom on both devices, and yes, I got a lot of funny looks for it
Same (eyeballing) screen brightness on both devices. Doing my best to make the load identical as best I can. Typical office-based workload, Edge on the PC, Safari on the Mac. Gmail in browser on both. Slack in the browser on Mac, Slack client on PC. Both have 8GB.
The data I've seen about 10%-15% per hour battery drain on MBA with Zoom seems right. With this workload, I think I'll be looking at around 7-8 hours with this use case, which is good but not as good as I expected. What is surprising is that this is about the same amount of power draw on the ThinkPad, which obviously doesn't have an ARM chip and which has an even smaller size LiIon battery than the MacBook.
- Hour # - MBA % / THKPD %
- Hour 1 - 90 / 90 <-----this is where I started the test
- Hour 2 - 82 / 84
- Hour 2 - 70 / 69
- Hour 3 - 53 / 48
- Hour 4 - 32 /28
- Hour 5 - 22 / 19
- Hour 6 - 4 / XX (PC abruptly went to sleep 45 min into hour 6 with 7% battery left during a Zoom call, then woke itself and showed 5%) <----stopped test
Didn't expect that. Both the ThinkPad doing as well as it did and the M1 MBA....not.
Zoom must be more optimized for the PC vs. the Rosetta 2 emulation on M1. Still, there are plenty of PC-based Ultrabooks that can deliver same or even BETTER battery life than this with a typical 'office" workload.
Unfortunately my takeaway from this test (which I did twice with similar results - but not scientific) is that the M1 MBA is a remarkable upgrade from the (lets be honest, underwhelming) Intel-based MBA, but for typical office-type Zoom-heavy use it is not the battery game-changer I thought it would be. I would bet that an HP Spectre x360, HP Elite Dragonfly, Yoga C940, Surface Pro X would all have actually done better on this test than the M1 MacBook Air. The ThinkPad L13 has a relatively tiny 46,000 mAh battery). Let's hope an M1/ARM-Native Zoom is more battery efficient than the current Zoom.